The Zagreb PHP user group has officially announced the first conference to be held in Croatia. This one-day conference will be held September 14th at Hrvatska Gospodarska Komora.

As second anniversary of ZgPHP meetups is coming soon, we decided to organize a mini PHP conference in Zagreb, first PHP conference in this region. It will be held in Croatian Chamber of Economy, Nova Cesta 7, Zagreb on September 14th. [...] On our mailing lists, Facebook & Twitter we have around 250 members, in average we have 25 visitors on each of our monthly meetups and for mini conference we are hoping to gather 120 PHP developers (not only Zagreb but Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Slovenia …).

The event's call for papers is also currently open and will be until August 25th. If you're interested in speaking at this event, you can find information for submitting in the post. If you plan on attending, sign up on the Meetup page. They've also posted the fist round of speakers and sessions there as well.

The year 2011 was a great success for developer communities in Zagreb. Although mobile developers started in 2010 with Mobile Monday, web developers were a bit shy and Ruby developers started first, then python meetups started and in the summer few people urged/pushed me to start organizing PHP Meetups. Besides colleagues I did not know a lot of PHP developers so I needed to spread the word about it. Twitter was the first step and it paid off. With only a few retweets there were already 10-20 people interested.

The post talks about the growth of the group, things they wish they'd done better (like involving local companies) and their work to create a custom logo for the group. If you're in the area and want to find out more about the group, check out their main page.

Although Zagreb PHP Meetup started only 3 months ago with monthly meetups (up to 30 developers coming), our next meeting will be first meetup with organized talks. December meetup will have 5 talks with themes like 'How to write readable code?', 'Flex & PHP development' , 'Introduction to test driven development' && 'MySQL - explain explained'.

We would like to invite all interested PHP and non-PHP developers that would like to listen to some of best Croatian PHP devs (and understand Croatian language) to come on December 13th from 6PM to Mama, Preradoviceva 18 in Zagreb. Unfortunately we are limited with number of available seats so please signup at http://zgphp.eventbrite.com/.

Due to space limitations, there's only 12 seats available so hurry and reserve your spot if you'd like to attend (it's free)!